Soon to be Gone

PhotographerTadas Kazakevicius

Prize2nd Place in Editorial / Photo Essay and Feature Story

City/CountryVilnius, Lithuania

Entry Description

During the Great Depression in US the continuous migration of people moving around in search of easier conditions was relentlessly changing the demographical map of the States: homesteads, villages were disappearing.
Somehow similar process is ongoing in the present-day Lithuania. Just within the last decade continuous migration has caused the population of Lithuania to shrink by almost one sixth. Towns are sucking out young people to the cities as it is the open economics of EU.
I am driven to hurry and turn those places into something more than just memories of future grandparents. Maybe this monument to the Lithuanian countryside will touch those hidden corners in the memory which we, seemingly inadvertently, have closed up, being used to accept what can be gone very quickly.

About Photographer

I am Tadas Kazakevicius, a thirty-three-year-old Lithuanian representative of documentary photography, now living in Vilnius, Lithuania, though I was born and grew up in a city of Šiauliai. Though professionally I work and specialise in advertising and have a diploma in architecture, half of my time I devote to and breathe in documentary photography. I have already been in photography for about eight years, with the last six of them being committed to individuals and their story, as the principal subject of my photography. I am a devotee of traditional film photography and prefer using medium format film cameras.